Stocks' Bad Day No One-Time Thing

Lots of problems have been brewing for some time. Buy protection while the options market offers it cheaply.

Wednesday wasn't exactly a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for stocks, but erasing about a quarter trillion dollars of value of U.S. equities (by Wilshire Associates' reckoning) qualifies as lousy. So did the 185-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or 1.45%, for the third straight losing session, bringing November's loss to 4%.

President Obama's first post-election news conference had "the certainly unintended effect that the more he talked the more stocks dropped," Uwe Parpart, the head of...